


We Are the Wild Youth

by Delatrista



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, blacksunweek2020
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:41:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25629145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delatrista/pseuds/Delatrista
Summary: Bringing a partner home for the holidays is usually a sign that the relationship is here to stay. The problem for Blake? She doesn't have a boyfriend. So she'll just have to fake one instead. It's a good thing her best friend is single, for now.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Sun Wukong
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is the prologue to a modern/fake dating AU I’ve been working on for a little while now! It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written a multi-chapter fic, but so far I have three chapters of this done and the entirety of the plot outlined. Modern AU’s aren’t usually my cup of tea, but I think blacksun fits the trope quite well, and I wanted to give it a shot! This will probably update very sporadically as I get into the swing of writing longer fics again, but I plan on seeing this through to the conclusion.

It’s a cool November evening when Blake’s phone rings. 

The apartment was blissfully silent beforehand, filled only with the sound of boiling water being poured for her mint tea. She’s using a mug she’s _fairly_ certain is clean— though it _was_ Weiss who was supposed to do the dishes the other night, and Blake still doesn’t entirely trust the girl to stay around a sink that’s overflowing with towers of plates crusted over by takeout food, and cups rimmed with dried coffee residue, for more than twenty minutes. She eyes the rim of the mug to make sure she’s not going to get awful flakes of grime in her drink, and sets the kettle back onto the stove.

The quiet she’d been enjoying until now has been broken by the shrill sound of wind chimes which make up her ringtone, and she gingerly wraps her hands around the steaming mug while she goes to leave the kitchen. Her phone is where she left it, perched precariously atop the couch in the living room, and a breeze from the open window on the opposite wall decides now is the right moment to pick up and stir the loose-leaf papers strewn across the carpeted floor into a miniature whirlwind. The only sources of illumination in the room come from the kitchen behind her, casting the place into an array of blue-tinged shadows and weak splashes of deep orange light, and the screen of her phone alight with the picture of a woman with short black hair and three hoop earrings— two on her right, and one adorning the left— and a soft smile lifting the corners of her lips. The word _Mama_ , followed by a kitten emoji, hovers above the woman’s image. Blake holds her mug in one hand to pick up her phone, and accept the call.

“Hey Mom,” she greets. Another burst of wind through the window scatters the papers in the room further, and she turns to lean against the back of the couch. On the other end of the line, she can hear rustling.

“Hi sweetie!” Kali’s voice is bright, and warm enough to rival the steaming tea she holds. “I’ve missed you. How’re finals going?”

Blake scoffs, but not unkindly. Her prep work for final exams is draining her will to live about as quickly as she goes through six cups of tea a night— and she’s only slightly ashamed to admit she’s accepted a cup of coffee from Weiss on a few occasions out of sheer desperation. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and tea can only do so much; she isn’t above admitting its limits. She takes solace in the fact that she refuses to give Weiss the satisfaction of turning her blood into caffeine no matter how much the girl tries to substitute her diet with iced mochas. So really, she still comes out on top. “I’m running on about three hours of sleep here, but it could be worse. How’s Dad?”

She had only talked to him a couple days ago, but she’s trying to make an effort to be polite, and it makes her mother happy when she engages herself in small talk. It’s more than she did for her mother _before_ —

She bites her lip to stop herself from going down that well-worn path.

“Oh, he’s fine. Stressing himself out over work because of the holidays, but what else is new. Did he tell you we’re almost finished with the new garden?” He did, in fact, tell her. Blake says as much in response. Kali rambles regardless, and Blake lets her, moving the phone to her shoulder so she can press it to her ear while she moves to the hallway which leads to the bedrooms.

The room she shares with one of her roommates, Yang, has become a miniature study in battlefield tactics in the last few weeks; loose-leaf papers litter the floor like land-mines, empty boxes for tea containers are strewn about like abandoned tanks in the no-man’s-land between the front lines of post-it notes and highlighters, and her desk is a fortress filled to the brim with notecards ready to be covered with formulas, excerpts, and speech cues. Much of the chaos is her own; Yang is infamous for putting off studying until the last possible minute, and it never fails to surprise Blake when the girl still manages to pull off a relatively high GPA despite the minimum effort she puts in...a fact which vexes Weiss to no end. 

She pushes aside textbooks and binders from the center of her desk while she settles into her worn leather chair, and takes a careful sip of her tea while Kali finishes explaining all the ways she plans on sectioning the garden off for a variety of herbs. 

“Sounds good,” she says absently, and fiddles with a pen as she takes hold of her phone in her hand again.

They make idle talk for a few more minutes, wherein Blake briefly explains just how little free time she has had the last few weeks due to the assignments she’s had to battle her way through. Kali sympathetically reminds her she’s been through this the past three years, and that she only has one more to go before she has her undergraduate degree in hand. It’s pleasant, if only mundane…but eventually, the conversation turns to an inevitable topic, one which has come up this time of year, in every call for the past three years.

“So…” Kali begins, her voice layered with expectancy, “will you be bringing anyone home for the holidays?”

Blake knows to expect the question every time Kali calls before she’s due back home. It’s common knowledge among her friends that her mother has a vested interest in her life and interests, and that zeal has even invaded her immediate environment through Yang, who has made it her life’s mission to play matchmaker for Blake— likely at Kali’s behest, Blake’s certain her mother and Yang conspire about this multiple times a month— lining up a total of thirteen dates with suitable bachelors. In all honesty, Blake can’t recall even one of their names, let alone their faces. She doesn’t care to. It’s never been important to her. Especially after, or perhaps _because_ , her last relationship’s troubles and all that it entailed. But that hasn’t stopped Kali from focusing her full attention into her daughter’s social life.

It’s a script that the two of them have memorized over the years; Kali asks, Blake declines, the cycle repeats. She appreciates the concern, she truly does, and every time this has happened she’s been sure to make it clear to her mother that no, she isn’t dating anyone and she won’t be bringing a boy home for her to meet over Thanksgiving dinner. And to give her mother credit, Kali backs off when Blake becomes too tense. She’s sure the questioning comes from a good place. For that alone, she tolerates it. She’s able to expect the questioning like she can expect the eventual turning of the seasons, and she plays along because quite honestly, she _likes_ having her mom looking out for her wellbeing like this. She just wishes Kali had done this a little bit sooner—

Then again, it probably wouldn’t have amounted to much in the long run.

So, Kali’s interest and questioning is to be expected. It’s _mostly_ harmless, and Blake has learned to anticipate it over the years.

What Blake _doesn’t_ expect is for her own mouth to betray her, forgetting the lines she’s always fed back in response, and say: “Actually, I’ve been seeing someone for a little bit. I’ll ask him if he’d be interested in coming to stay for a few days.”

..:|:..

Thus, after weeks of warding off her mother’s endless list of questions with the vaguest descriptions of her definitely-not-made-up-boyfriend as she could manage, and with less than a week to go before she’s due back home, Blake’s left wondering if she can realistically pull off an imaginary breakup with a boy who hadn’t really existed in the first place.

“Maybe I can say he cheated on me and I dumped him,” she mutters. Her gloved hands curl around a steaming to-go cup of chai latte, and her brow furrows while she stares at the snow-covered sidewalk, as if the gray sludge holds the answers she seeks. At her side, a chime sounds as the door opens to let out a group of dead-eyed, exhausted students encumbered with carry-out trays and overstuffed binders. Their voices fade into the dull roar of traffic on the salt-strewn road, and she lifts her cup to take a short drink.

Across from her, Sun hums a thoughtful noise. 

They’re sat outside one of Beacon State University’s four Starbucks, each of them nursing their cups of tea and hot chocolate, respectively, and taking advantage of a rare sunny day; the kind that only seem to come around the more one expects snow to fall. It’s accentuated with the dead trees and brown grass that make the world seem lifeless, without pristine white snow to cover their bare branches and dormant blades. The cold sunshine which is customary of this time of year beats down on her exposed face, but it offers no warmth while a breeze stirs around them. 

She shivers miserably. Her hair has been whipped into a tangled frenzy by the frost-tinged wind, and one of her boots has had snow melting inside of it for the past twenty minutes, soaking into her two layers of socks.   


She still wouldn’t miss being here, despite how awful she feels. It’s a weekly ritual for her and Sun to have these meetings. Blake would never admit this to him, but she’s secretly glad that she and Sun haven’t missed a week since they started this habit in the fall of their freshman year. 

Sun takes a long sip from his hot chocolate and winces; whipped cream sits at the top of his lip in a comical imitation of a mustache, but he ignores it in favor of sticking his tongue out to try and save it from burning.  After a few moments of blowing into the lid of his drink he says, “Nah. Mom’ll probably ask you for his address so she can go kill him.”

She always marvels at how he’s so at ease calling her parents his own, having done so since the second time he’d met them. Though, that was entirely Kali’s doing; she definitely encouraged that particular habit, much to Ghira’s chagrin. Still, Blake always takes a small amount of amusement in the grimace that crosses her father’s face whenever Sun calls him _Papa B._ , especially since the glower seems more put on as time passes. 

Sun taps a few times against the cup, and then continues with his sagely advice. 

“I wouldn’t go the commitment route at all, to be honest. She’ll be fussing over you all break, thinking you got your heart broken. That’s your worst nightmare! People hovering over you, asking if you’re okay…” He shoots her a lopsided grin, and Blake feels an urge to lean across the table to swipe the whipped cream off of his face. He already looks ridiculous enough in his eyesore of a Christmas scarf, a monstrosity of alternating red-and-green stripes lined with stars, pine trees, and dinosaurs. 

She doesn’t get the point of that last addition, but apparently the thing is a gift from Scarlet that Sun insists on wearing the moment the temperature drops below the freezing point of water. Frankly, it’s a crime against fashion as well as humanity itself, but that doesn’t stop Sun from breaking that particular law. In truth, that scarf is one of the few inside jokes left that she doesn’t understand about Sun and his roommates-slash-surrogate brothers in her three long years of knowing them…and quite frankly, Blake is just fine not getting it. He can keep his dinosaur Christmas scarf, so long as it’s never around her neck.

Her eyes dart to his mouth when his tongue swipes up to catch the offending substance on his skin, and she’s just as quick to look away when she realizes what she’s doing. She lifts her drink to her face, breathes in the smell of steam and tea, and watches Sun fiddle with his phone in an attempt to text with gloves fitted with “touch-screen technology” that he’d bought at the corner store on one of their trips to this same café. It doesn’t appear to have been successful, since he eventually yanks one glove off by the finger and hurriedly taps his thumb across the screen. A crease forms between his eyebrows while he frowns at it, and she can hear the sound of him hitting the backspace button every few clicks.

Blake sets her cup back down on the table just as Sun pockets his phone again.

“Do you think she’d buy the ‘we broke up a while ago and I didn’t say anything’ angle?” she asks. She frowns when Sun immediately shakes his head, then groans in a fit of despair before burying her face in her hands.

“I’ve screwed myself,” she laments, “why did I have to tell her I was seeing someone? I didn’t think this through! I put as much effort into this as Ruby does into studying for physics.”

“Hey, don’t say that,” Sun chastises, and Blake peers through parted fingers at him while he tuts, watching as he exaggeratedly wags his finger at her. “Ruby’s actually got at least a D now.”

“Good for her,” she says dryly. “She still doesn’t have to deal with Mom asking if she’s seeing anyone every few days.”

Sun takes another, smaller sip from his hot chocolate while he shrugs. “At least you don’t have to spend the next three weeks with Neptune,” he tells her, “the man is absolutely dreading this vacation.” 

He shakes his head in disappointment, and Blake slowly takes her hands off her face to stare at him. “Can you believe it? His parents are taking us on a _cruise_ , and he’s acting like he’s being sent to the electric chair. I’m gonna have to babysit him all day at the beach instead of using those surfing lessons his dad bought.”

He launches into a rant about the utter tragedy his life will become, once he’s confined to a boat in the middle of the ocean with the most aqua-phobic person known to man. Blake isn’t fully paying attention, even though she tracks Sun’s wild hand gestures. Ironically, his tone smacks of the attitude he’s accusing Neptune of when he mourns all of the snorkeling he’ll miss out on because _someone_ will have to go as far in-land with Neptune as he’s able to reach on the cruise’s various stops around the Caribbean— “His parents sure as hell won’t do it,” Sun cries dramatically— but she doesn’t point this fact out to him as he talks between drinks. Sun keeps getting whipped cream on his face, and he eventually reaches a point where he stops trying to lick it away. She leans her chin on her hand while she eyes his mouth.

He’s in the middle of explaining to her just how annoyed he is that he won’t be able to experience the cruise’s water slides with anyone else when the proverbial lightbulb goes off above her head. 

The idea it sparks clicks into place like it’s the solution she’d been looking for all along, the final piece of the puzzle to get her out of the mess that she, admittedly, has only herself to blame for. Her eyes widen, and suddenly she can’t be less interested in hearing Sun move onto explaining just how great the ship’s infinity pool is when she interjects with, “How would you like to be my boyfriend for a month, instead?”

A few things happen then, in a sequence of events that can only be defined as, _a recipe for disaster_.

First, Sun’s teeth clack together so hard she can hear the impact from across the table, and she cringes in sympathy.   


As he twitches, his hand knocks into his hot chocolate, and the cup tilts sideways in slow-motion. It hits the table after an eternity spent suspended in freefall, and soon the drink pours lazily from underneath the white rim across the surface. Blake reaches for the napkins in her purse while the liquid pools towards Sun to drip onto his lap. He stutters out an apology while she hands him a few, before using the rest to swipe across the table.   


His face has turned as cherry-red as the stripes on his scarf, and Blake would ask him what the issue was if she wasn’t so caught off-guard by his response.

Sun stutters over another string of apologies as he finishes blotting the remnants of his drink from his jeans. “I— excuse me?” he finally asks, and his voice sounds slightly breathless, just enough to be noticeable. 

And notice Blake does. She shakes away the return of the flutter in her chest, before she can think on it too critically. She pulls her chai latte close to her chest, draws the warmth into her fingers, and uses that to excuse the way her face flames while Sun stares at her with widened eyes.

When he doesn’t say anything further, she elaborates on her plan. “I mean, you can come stay with me for the break,” she’s quick to explain, “we can tell Mom we’re just seeing how it goes since we’ve known each other for a bit…she adores you so I’m sure she won’t ask too many questions, and Dad could probably think of worse guys I could bring home. I’m sure he won’t be too hard on us. We could say we decided we’re better off as friends once we leave, so…”

A couple minutes of strained silence pass while Sun looks like he’s trying to remember how to breathe. He has that look on his face that he gets whenever he realizes he forgot yet another presentation that was due the next day, and Blake is about ready to take back everything she just said when he shakes his head in short, chopped bursts.

“You…want to fake date,” he says. He sounds like he doesn’t believe what he said, and Blake quickly brings her tea to her lips. 

It is, admittedly, a brazen idea.  She’s not surprised Sun’s so shocked by it. _S_ _he_ expects better from herself, but she’s also desperate for something that will get Kali off her back long enough to give her some breathing room.   


The embarrassment she’s feeling is sure to be coloring her face as red as his, and she takes a long sip as an excuse to hide behind the drink.

“Don’t worry about it,” she finally says, her voice muffled behind the lid of her cup. “You just don’t seem like you want to go on break with Neptune, and I need to do _something_ about this thing with Mom, so I thought we could kill two birds with one stone.”   


She takes a drink to prolong the foreboding rejection she senses building in front of her. Why would Sun choose staying with her and her parents, when he had the option to go on a cruise? She’s sure she’s overstepped, and the longer Sun keeps gaping at her, the more she wants to forget she ever brought the idea up. So Blake presses on, hoping to remind Sun he has better things to do than help her with... _this_.  


“Seriously, it’s not a big deal, I know that you’ve been looking forward to this cruise for weeks. I get it if you’d rather go do that…” she trails into silence when Sun starts shaking his head.

“Blake,” he says, and his tone is so serious that she lowers her cup from her face to give him her undivided attention. 

There’s a furrow between his eyes, and they stare at each other in silence for a few moments. Her heart is practically pounding in her chest, and she can’t seem to calm it down while she waits for what Sun’s going to say next. The anxiety mounts with each beat, and it’s in some ways worse than almost anything she’s experienced in recent times.

She fiddles with the cardboard holder around her drink as she waits, and the sound of it scraping her paper cup is the only sound to break the quiet lull of traffic around them. Sun’s eyes dart across her face, assessing her for something she can’t guess at.   


She’s afraid that she’ll have to ask him what he’s looking for when a grin splits his face. 

“Which pet name do you want: babe, sweetness, or honey?”

Blake groans, and puts her face back into her hands. She got what she wanted...and it’s going to be a long three weeks before it’s all over.


	2. December 7th

The apartment Blake has lived in for the last year is generally a comfortable space; one of the few she’s been able to find on campus in the three years she has been attending Beacon State University. Despite the fact that none of their furniture matches, the only commonality being that they all clash with the walls painted in a terribly bland beige. She often wonders how worth it it would be to just buy fresh paint and lose their deposit. Their appliances often fail to work as intended, leaving them to order take out which pile up in their trash until its overflowing with pizza boxes and coffee trays.

Even with these problems, the clash of leather couches and wicker armchairs, the stove that rarely sparks to life, the apartment is inviting. Warmth spreads out invitingly from the well-worn seats, like Yang’s incessant hugs. The air is sweet with the scent of Weiss’s candles, fresh vanilla weaving and flowing underneath the more prevalent aroma of pine needles. Ruby’s artwork and photography is hung on every available surface, depictions of landscapes and night skies to splash color across the otherwise drab walls.

Her own touch is felt in the apartment. The comfort she seeks in soft blankets which are strewn in nearly every room. The potted flowers and bushes that are clustered on the windowsills and along their wooden deck. The piles of books used as makeshift tables which litter the floor, with their post-it note bookmarks sticking out from their pages in multi-colored tongues. All of these are hers. Her space, a home that she has carved out to include the shape of three girls.

At the moment, however, she would rather be anywhere else than in this lovely, unbearably cramped space.

“I can’t believe you told your mom— just, did you think this through at all?!”

Blake sighs, and the desire to sink into the floor grows stronger with the breath that leaves her lips. Her thumb and middle finger have been glued to her temples for the past ten minutes. Her eyes have been tracking Weiss as she walks circuits around the living room, pacing so quickly that her ivory hair trails behind her, and all she’s been listening to is a constant rendition of variations on her newest hit single, “ _You can’t be serious.”_

Yang, from her spot at the corner of their massive L-shaped couch that Blake believes predates the Dark Ages, crunches through another handful of Cheetos. “You heard her,” she says through her food, “…do you want her to explain it to you again? You’ve been talking to yourself for so long I think you’ve forgotten why you’re so upset.”

Weiss pauses in her pacing and points a finger in Yang’s direction, an action which is clearly meant to get her to stop talking. Yang laughs when Weiss glowers at her over the rim of her transparent, wide-framed glasses.

Blake exhales again.

She’d elected to tell her roommates about the scheme she and Sun had concocted, and the situation which called for it, for two reasons: firstly, she needed to bounce ideas off of them. She knows next to nothing about what a normal relationship is like, how to act smitten and shy and generally nervous like most new relationships call for. Her only experience with romance…isn’t the most conventional, and she refuses to draw upon that memory; thus, she called on her friends for advice. Secondly, she can admit that she’s _slightly_ panicking over the notion of pretending to be in a relationship with Sun, of all people, and she needed to vent.

She had already tried talking to Nora, but the girl had given her an unreadable look, said, “Huh, that’s…going to settle some stuff,” and wished her luck.

Pyrrha hadn’t been much better, but at least she thought that Blake and Sun dating would be more convincing than telling her mom this mystery boyfriend had decided to fall off the face of the earth for winter break, instead of meeting his girlfriend’s parents. Blake still isn’t sure why she had gone to Pyrrha for advice, though. Given how spectacularly the girl fails to hide her affection for Jaune from everyone _except_ for the boy himself— though in Pyrrha’s defense, he _is_ about as observant as a brick wall, but that doesn’t stop Yang and Nora from teasing her relentlessly over her obvious crush— she may be more desperate for help than she’s willing to let on.

In the other corner of the room, Ruby is curled into a beanbag chair, eyes darting between Yang and Weiss as they bicker. Her maroon sweatshirt is wrinkled and worn, but she looks far more comfortable than Blake feels in this moment. When her eyes move away from the argument to meet Blake’s, she speaks for the first time since Blake had called the girls in here.

“I’ve got a question,” she says, and repeats herself when the girls don’t seem to hear her.

Yang and Weiss cut off, and Yang happily goes back to her Cheetos. Ruby waits for a moment, then presses on. “Are you okay? This doesn’t…seem like something you’d do.”

Weiss turns her focus back to Blake, cerulean eyes sharp and unyielding.

For her part, Blake meets her stare evenly, and takes her hand away from her face. Her arms cross over her chest on their own accord. Ruby’s eyes don’t leave her, and she hears Yang shuffle in her seat, likely to join their friends in staring her down.

She mulls over how much she wants to divulge, turning the thought over like a well-worn stone in her mind for a few, unending moments. She takes in Weiss’s scowl, then shifts her attention over to the small frown that Ruby wears, before finally settling on Yang, who has draped herself across the back of the couch with her Cheeto bag forgotten on the seat beside her, and she arches a single golden eyebrow in silent prompting when Blake looks to her.

“I’m the one who brought it up in the first place,” she finally reminds them. She pushes herself off of the wall she had been leaning on for the entirety of this discussion. She moves over to the small breakfast table that Ruby and Yang had brought with them when they had moved in, shoved against the back of the counters which divide the kitchen from the living room. She’s quick to fold herself into one of the seats, and continues speaking before Weiss can begin her fretting anew.

“You’re right, this isn’t something I would normally do. But…I want to make my mom happy.” Weiss’s expression falls at that, but she stays silent.

Blake heart clenches pitifully, and she pushes past the topic of her mother with quick words. “And I’m comfortable enough with Sun that I don’t feel worried. I’m sure it’ll be fine. I just…don’t know how to make this seem normal.”

The girls are silent for a few moments, and Blake finds a coffee stain on the carpet to examine in great detail while the silence stretches onward.

“I’m not trying to be controlling,” Weiss finally says, “I’m just worried about you. You don’t have to do so much to make your mom happy if it makes you feel uncomfortable…” She trails off.

Blake appreciates the sentiment left unspoken. The silent, _“But do what’s best for you,”_ that she can translate from Weiss’s stilted, _genuine_ attempt at comfort.

“Thank you.” She raises her stare back up to meet Weiss’s. “I know it’s out of character for me. But I’ve thought this out enough, and Sun’s agreed to it. At worst, I’ll just tell my mom that Sun and I decided to stay friends in the spring.”

“Or she’ll figure out you’re lying and rub it in your face for the next thirty years,” Yang adds, and Ruby snickers.

Blake scowls at them both. She knows Yang is right, though she feels her face grow warm at the suggestion of this scheme falling apart. Kali wouldn’t necessarily be upset, if she caught on to this half-baked scheme. Blake’s sure her father would pretend at being relieved to learn she isn’t dating Sun; the worst she could expect from her mother is to be teased over the whole thing until Kali wore the subject out. The thought makes her feel better, if only slightly, and she smiles.

“So…if you’re done interrogating me over my life choices,” Weiss’s face contorts into something that resembles a disbelieving scowl. She doesn’t get the chance to interrupt before Blake continues, “Could you guys give me some advice now? I want to make this believable.”

Ruby yawns dramatically, and uncurls from her spot in her beanbag to stand.

“I don’t know the first thing about dating,” she says. “Dunno if I’ll be the best help here, so…Weiss, Yang, you guys got this!” She darts for the hallway where the bedrooms are as she speaks.

Weiss reaches out to take hold of the girl’s hooded sweatshirt as she passes in a maroon blur, effectively halting her in place. Ruby lets out an undignified squawk that Blake snorts at, and turns to Weiss with a pout on her face. The white-haired girl pins her with a stern look, and nods to the couch in a silent directive. Ruby does as ordered, and snags the Cheetos bag away so she can sit next to her sister, who reaches over to grab a handful of the snack.

“What are you so concerned about, exactly?” Weiss asks, while Ruby grumbles to Yang with a voice too low to hear her words. She perches herself on the arm of the couch as she speaks, and wraps her navy blue cardigan tighter around herself as she goes.

Blake leans back against the counters. “Everything,” she admits. “I don’t know how to act like we’ve been in a relationship for months. I don’t want to seem fake.”

“Well, the best way for that to happen is for you to overdo the PDA,” says Yang. “So, just don’t do that. Not that _you_ have to be worried about it, but Sun’s already a pretty physical guy— if you know what I’m saying.” She wags her eyebrows and winks at Blake when she groans. “But it’ll also be suspicious if you don’t start anything either. So, just hug now and then. Act like you can’t be more than three feet away from him when you’re in the same room.”

“Should I…kiss him?” Blake asks. A scenario flashes in her mind, of a body pressed close to her, of warm breath on her face. Of gunmetal eyes filling her vision until all she can see is an expanse of soft, cool gray. Her face burns as she imagines it, and her mouth curls into a grimace around the word _kiss_.

“Not unless you’ve planned it with him ahead of time.” Blake has never been more grateful for Yang’s voice as it breaks her from her thoughts. “Sun’s probably just as bad an actor as you are— don’t give me that look, you’re the one asking us how to look like you’re in love!” She tuts, and shakes her head. Blake continues to scowl as Yang grins back, her smile anything but innocent. “ _Anyways_ …he’ll probably freak out, and you’ll have some explaining to do about why you two can’t kiss without someone internally combusting when you’ve supposedly been dating for a little while.”

“I’d stay away from acting like a couple at all unless you have to,” Ruby suggests. “You’re more comfortable around him as a friend, right? So just act like nothing’s different!”

Weiss is quick to interject. “The whole point of this is for Blake and Sun to be a couple,” she says, and crosses her arms when Ruby blows a raspberry in her direction. “Don’t be childish,” she grumbles, and then groans when Yang follows her sister’s act.

Turning her back on the sisters currently snickering at her expense, Weiss asks a question directed at Blake. “Have you _talked_ with Sun about what you’re going to do yet?”

She hasn’t, and she’s more than a bit ashamed to admit that particular fact aloud. Ever since their usual Starbucks meet-up two days ago, neither of them have planned anything beyond her initial proposal. At the time, she had assumed asking Sun to be her fake-boyfriend for three weeks would be enough, and everything would fall perfectly into place afterwards. She hadn’t counted on the particular reality of this situation being that she is far from the world’s best actress, and she had neglected to consider that Sun is prone to winging things when left to his own devices.

Blake never claimed to be _good_ at scheming. But perhaps she still thought too highly of her skill when she thought of this harebrained plan in the first place. When she answers Weiss’s question honestly, she’s bluntly told that she needs to call Sun _right now_ and set out their boundaries.

“I’m going over to his place later,” she mutters, instead of reaching for her phone.

Weiss is only slightly appeased by this, yet still frets over how ill-planned this whole thing is. Yang hums a suggestive noise at what Blake said, and she feels her face grow red again when the girl says, “Going over to your boyfriend’s, hm? Do we need to give you ‘the talk’?”

“ _Yang!_ ”

Her roommate is cackling loudly at her embarrassment, while she folds into herself as though she could collapse like a dying star. Blake is sure she’s going to light on fire. She’s going to combust in the middle of her living room, and all that’s going to be left of her will be a scorch mark on the tan carpet. A vindictive part of her is tempted by the idea. Weiss would keel over from the unsightly blemish on the floor, at the least, and she wouldn’t have to deal with the fallout of that particular meltdown. Or the upcoming winter break, for that matter.

 _Yes_ , Blake thinks, watching the chaos of her roommates bickering unfolding before her. Loud words and Cheetos rain through the air as Ruby flails her arms in wild gestures. _Catching on fire would be great, right about now._

..:|:..

Four hours and five boxes of takeout food later, Blake finds herself curled into a plush, ancient armchair in the living room of the apartment that Sun shares with his three roommates.

Sun and two others, Scarlet David and Neptune Vasilias, are sprawled out across the floor with their eyes glued to the tv screen. They’re too focused on killing each other in one of the fighting games they rotate through to eat the plates of largely untouched Chinese takeout in front of them. Their other roommate, Sage, busies himself with his phone.

The air is filled to the brim with curses and accusations, lobbed like missiles between the three boys dueling amongst themselves. She, however, is filled with trepidation and embarrassment in equal measures.

Blake picks at her lo mein as she watches the chaos unfolding on the tv screen. She’s been eating at piecemeal pace, waiting for the inevitable moment where she’ll have to interrupt the boys’ game with her plotting. Five matches ago, she’d told herself she would interrupt once the game was over. Last match, she determinedly settled on speaking up after Scarlet wins his first and only game of the night. Conveniently, it didn’t look like Sun and Neptune were going to let him win any time soon, though Blake won’t admit to counting on that. Her heart is still jumping sporadically in her chest, and her chopsticks shake between her fingers.

Out of the corner of her eye, she notices a pair of hazel eyes flick to her. Again.

Sage Ayana is quiet. She’s rarely heard him speak unless he had been spoken to first. It’s one of the reasons why she gets along with him more easily than Scarlet or Neptune; he prefers to be alone, more often than not. She can empathize with that. His appearance makes him stand out more than she does, though; his hair is dyed a deep, verdant green, and a trove of tattoos decorate his dark skin. From the pair of intricately lined wings unfurling over the broad planes of his chest, to the Roman numerals that wrap around his wrist, it’s hard to mistake him for anyone else, or allow him to blend into the background. His presence, a quiet but solid companion, speaks far louder than his words could.

She usually likes Sage’s silence, the way he understands her desire for quiet more than most of their shared friend group does. At the moment, however, she would prefer he spoke his mind. She has a strong suspicion that he’s planning something behind those mellow eyes.

When she looks up for the fourth time this evening, she once again meets Sage’s stare. For the first time, she doesn’t look away.

He doesn’t seem surprised by this, choosing to look at her with an even gaze as still as the ocean, revealing nothing of what he’s thinking underneath the surface. It’s with no small amount of effort that she stares back, imitating his imperturbable expression to the best of her ability.

In the silence of their stare down, Sun whoops. Her fingers twitch at the sound. She stabs her chopsticks into her noodles, which have long since gone cold as she spun them around her plate, to hide the spasm in her hand. The wood clatters against cheap porcelain. Sage watches her with piercing attention.

“Sun told us he’s going to stay with you for break,” he finally says. Underneath the current of swears and bets emanating from the boys on the carpeted floor, he’s barely audible. Nonetheless, Blake understands him perfectly. She tears her eyes from his, and finds great interest in the pile of honey-brown noodles and verdant vegetables strewn over her plate. 

“Yeah.”

She hadn’t known how much more awkward this conversation could get until this moment, when Sage is studying her reddening cheeks. She twirls her food around her chopsticks, and forces herself to take a bite.

“Any reason why he’d choose that, over a cruise through the Caribbean?”

Blake shrugs. She takes another unwanted mouthful of her lo mein, in an effort to prolong saying the words aloud.

It was one thing to tell her roommates about this. She trusted them more than anyone in the world, with few exceptions. And they didn’t know Sun like she did. Like his own roommates did, in fact. His roommates who, on many occasions, were strangely protective of him in ways even her own friends weren’t of her. Sage inquiring about her plan for the winter break felt like she was about to get the classic, “Don’t hurt him or else,” speech. In the face of that prospect, she can see why most people dread that conversation.

 _Better to be upfront,_ she reasons. Sucks in a deep breath, and raises her gaze back to Sage’s. “My mom asked if I was bringing a boyfriend home for break, and I’d told her yes.” Sage blinks, the first reaction she’s seen from him all night.

“And you didn’t have one.” His tone is flat enough to balance her plate on. _He knows,_ she thinks. There is a cold lump forming in her throat, its shape similar to that of guilt. She swallows around it to ignore the wandering thought of why it was there in the first place.

“I asked Sun if he wanted to pretend to be my boyfriend for break. He said yes.”

Sage leans back in his seat, and remains silent.

A string of colorful curses erupts from the floor, and with them the fragile bubble of tension that has been growing around her shatters. Blake turns her head towards the outcry, grateful for the distraction.

Scarlet has his head buried between his hands, his controller abandoned in front of his crossed legs. Beside him, Sun pats his back; her eyes track the line of his arm before he is quick to pull away. He returns his focus on the death match unfolding between him and Neptune on the screen, even while Scarlet is wallowing in defeat at his side. An invisible weight settles around her shoulders, draped across the breadth of her torso in the shape of the arm he had settled on his roommate’s back.

Sage continues to eye her, a curious light flickering in his eyes. “I guess I can’t blame him,” he finally says, with cryptic finality. He returns his attention to his phone once more, and goes silent.

A breath she hadn’t known she was holding in releases from her lips in a sigh.

More commotion sounds off in front of the tv. She looks to her plate, regretfully eying the cold noodles she has shredded into small bits as she wonders if it would be better to save them for later, or pass them off to one of the boys. When she turns her head with the question on her lips, she pauses.

Sun has stood from his sprawled position on the floor, while Neptune and Scarlet sit cross-legged on either side of his legs. His arms raise over his head, and he pops the tension out of his spine with an exaggerated groan. After a moment, he turns on his heel, and his attention immediately lands on her. A smile lights up his gray eyes as he approaches her.

“You two’ve been quiet,” he points out. “Did either of you want to tag in? I’m going to the store.”

Blake wordlessly shakes her head. On most days, she may have been more willing to take him up on that offer. She always found a secret joy in beating the boys at their own games, despite how often they warred against each other. Sun, in particular, was always the easiest to rile up. But not tonight, when she had more pressing things to think about. Sage is silent as well, but out of the corner of her eye she sees him raise out of his seat. He passes by Sun, and settles into the empty space he’d left on the floor. Scarlet is quick to protest Sage’s presence, bemoaning the diminishing of his chances to finally win a match this evening as the other boy picks up Sun’s controller.

Sun eyes her, his gaze darting over the expanse of her body. It eventually returns to her face, and he nods towards the front door. “Wanna come with?”

She stares back at him. Something strikes her, as she takes in his loose posture, the casual way he made gray sweatpants and an off-white t-shirt look appealing. The idea of Sun as her partner, flashing in her head in a burst of lightning. She attempts to picture him sitting in her parents’ living room, pressed shoulder to thigh at her side. Tries to imagine what it would be like to wrap her arms around his back, pretending that she was in love with him. All the things a couple were, wrapped up in a neat package for everyone to see; all the things she and Sun were not. Part of her can’t believe the concept.

 _He is going to be my boyfriend_. Blake tests the words in her mind, prodding them with curious fingers. They feel foreign, even alien. Stiff, like unworn shoes when compared to the more familiar comfort in the title of best friend, where it reigns over her memories of him. She lowers her plate to the floor at the foot of her chair, the noodles barely sliding with the movement, and unfurls from the chair’s warm velvet embrace.

“Sure,” she responds.

She moves for the door before Sun does, padding on silent feet over the carpet, and she hears him telling his roommates that they would be back. As she’s putting on her oversized parka and donning her boots, she chances an off-handed glance towards the boys.

Scarlet and Neptune have returned their attention to the tv as they bicker over which game to play next. Bright aqua flashes as Neptune shakes his head, and strands of dyed hair fall over his eyes, but he doesn’t turn to face her and Sun as he speaks in a tone too low for her to hear. Sage, however, is leaning back in his cross-legged position; once again, he’s watching her.

His intent is still unfathomable. She feels seen, somehow, and she quirks an eyebrow in response to his probing stare. Despite not knowing what it is Sage is looking for in her, she can’t shake the feeling that he’s learned something about her this evening.

Then his eyes switch to Sun, who’s emerging from his bedroom down the hall while shrugging on a old sweatshirt emblazoned with a fading image of BSU’s lime green logo, of laurel leaves encircling a pair of crossed hatchets. He pays neither of them any mind as walks to her side. He slips on his yellow sneakers, pats his front pockets, and then looks to her.

“You good?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she says, far too abruptly to be casual. With one last glance towards Sage, she turns towards the front door. His eyes burn holes into the dark canvas of her parka, and she’s urged to get out of the apartment by the desire to leave before smoke begins to curl from her back. Cold winter air nips at her cheeks as she steps into the night, and her body is immediately overcome with shivers. She’ll never get used to all this frost and ice; she grew up in sunshine and humid air for too long to ever be comfortable in this kind of still, uncompromising climate.

As she waits on the landing for Sun to follow her, she shoves her hands in her pockets; she’d forgotten her gloves at home, and she can see flakes of snow beginning to tumble in the beams of light cast by the streetlights stationed throughout the parking lot below. Not enough to stick to the frozen ground, she’s certain, but they dance entrancingly in the illuminating glow before vanishing on the dark grass and asphalt.

Golden light spills from the open doorway when she glances towards it, falling over the exposed concrete walkway that rings the second floor of the complex Sun lives in. Her breath leaves her in small puffs of mist, and she watches the falling snowflakes absentmindedly.

Eventually she hears footsteps, and a door clicking shut behind her.

“Sorry,” Sun says sheepishly. Blake turns just in time to watch as he shoves his wallet and a lanyard into his sweatshirt pocket. “Forgot my keys.” He smiles when he notices her watching him, and she offers him a tentative huff of laughter in return.

“Are we driving?” she asks. They both turn towards the stairwell, and he matches his long strides to pair with hers.

“Nah. Just going to the dollar store.”

They descend to the parking lot in silence. As they cross it, walking towards the front of the building which faces the main road, she thinks that she may have been wrong in thinking the snow wouldn’t build up this evening; the black concrete is already dusted with a thin layer of white, and whirls of snowflakes are strewn underneath the frozen cars. Their footsteps are the only things which disturb the vast expanse, cutting a path towards the street which are absent of bustling cars in the late hour.

The two of them are the only pedestrians roaming the sidewalk once they reach it. Sun lives on a narrow, one-way street, lined on one side with cheap apartments and dorms piled on a hill that comes to an abrupt end at street level. Dead bushes line the retaining wall holding the cascading dirt back from the road, their branches reaching out like spindly fingers to catch on her parka and her hair with sharp pricks. On the other side, storefronts glow with cold blue light shining through their floor length windows, and neon signs that pulse invitingly at passersby. Telephone poles are stuck into the sidewalk at even intervals, their cables strung across the open air like fraying threads, and crossing over the street at various points.

Beacon’s campus is expansive, situated in the foothills of mountains which rise up in the distance towards the weeping clouds. Sun’s complex is at the very edge of the school’s boundaries, hoisted above the rest of the buildings on one of the higher hills that surround them. It’s peaceful, this far away from the downtown that she lives near. The still winter air seems to capture the world with bated breath, suspending reality as it’s illuminated by the florescent lights of the stores across the street.

Their footsteps crunch through the settling snow on the sidewalk as they go, and she finds herself captivated by the way the flakes twirl in front of her. Every so often, however, her arm brushes against Sun’s; and the touches remind her of her goal in coming to his place today.

She doesn’t bring up the sensitive topic while they cross the street, heading for the bright yellow-and-green lights of the dollar store that Sun was so intent on. “What do you need to get?” she asks instead. Surely she can talk about their arraignment once he’s gotten his shopping done. A chime calls out to the empty store as Sun reaches past her to open the glass door, and she quickly steps into the blissfully warm, stuffy air.

A lone employee mans the lanes of checkout counters by the doors, and he calls out a bored greeting to them once he looks up from his register. The laminated tiles of the floor are covered in scuff marks of shoes being dragged over its surface, and Blake’s boots squeak with melted slush as she walks further inside.

“Forgot to get groceries earlier,” Sun explains to her back. She turns to face him, and watches as he picks up the last basket left in a small wire stand. She hums, and raises an eyebrow.

“Grocery shopping?” she jibes, and pulls her hand out of her pocket to poke at his arm. “You call frozen meals ‘groceries’ now?” She smirks as he puts on an offended frown.

“Hey, it’s food,” he defends. They walk through the compact, abandoned aisles with ease, and Sun quickly overtakes her as the urge of food calls to him.

“Just barely…”

Sun pauses in his pursuit, and nudges his shoulder into hers once she catches up to him.

Apparently, the topic of ready-made food is a serious one for him; after much deliberation between various frozen pizzas and steaks, Sun’s basket is laden with enough red boxes to last him a couple of weeks without ever touching a stove. As he debates with himself over the merits of certain brands, Blake chastises him for not choosing health over taste. He doesn’t listen to her, of course; but she can at least say she made an effort to change his habits.

They’re working their way towards the checkout counters when Sun stops, and eyes a shelf of ceramic mugs with great focus.

This is unfamiliar territory to Blake; Sun’s never shown such an interest in “world’s best dad” mugs, to her knowledge. She watches as he scrutinizes the cups and mugs with narrowed eyes, balancing his overfilled basket on his hip with the handles hooked over the bend of his arm.

She opens her mouth to ask him what he’s looking for, when he speaks.

“Does Mom like things like these?” He points at a group painted with depictions of cats on their surfaces. Blake takes a closer look at the one his finger is aimed at, clean white ceramic with a green teacup painted into it. A smiling kitten rests within it, and over its head are the words, _paw-fee break_.

She rolls her eyes. “She’s not a mug collector, but she likes cats,” she says. Sun hums at that, and after another moment examining the mugs— which all bear animal puns in this section, she realizes— he strides towards the entrance once again.

..:|:..

They’re back out in the cold before she’s fully ready to face it again. The weather has gotten worse in the short time she and Sun had spent in the store, and thick clumps of snow have begun to tumble from the sky in an endless cascade. She sighs, and her breath forms a steaming cloud in front of her. Sun’s teeth clatter together, and she looks over to him once the door swings shut behind them. He offers her a smile despite the chill, the warmth of it enough to seep into the damp layer of her parka to her skin beneath, and then they cross the road without a car in sight.

They’ll be back in the apartment soon, she muses as they retrace their steps, which are barely visible on the sidewalk. The snow has fallen so quickly that their footprints will soon vanish under a new layer. They’ll be back in the crowded living room with Sage, Scarlet, and Neptune; and she probably won’t get the chance to talk to Sun about winter break once that happens. She knows that Weiss was right, earlier. It’s a conversation that they need to have, sooner rather than later. She just doesn’t like the tight feeling that builds in her chest as the words form on her tongue.

Yet they talk of simple things while they hurry towards Sun’s home in the quiet night air. Exams they’re dreading, teachers they don’t like, how much they both hate the snow. She keeps the conversation away from anything heavier until until they reach the front of his building.

It takes the realization that they’re walking up the hill towards the parking lot for her to finally speak up.

“We should probably talk about break,” she says quietly, once Sun finishes complaining about his philosophy teacher’s obscure grading criteria.

Her eyes are on the side of his face, and he hesitates before turning to look at her. His lips purse in thought, appraising her in silence, before he nods. “Want go to my car? That way the guys won’t walk in,” he offers.

She nods. Sage’s observant stare from earlier returns to the forefront of her thoughts, and realizes she’d rather not have him around while she’s planning how to fake being Sun’s girlfriend.

The car in question is an old, beat-up hatchback, parked at the far end of the lot underneath a glowing streetlight. The maroon paint has long faded, with bits of rust eating away at the bottom of the car towards the doors. Once they get close enough to the car they stop, and Sun goes around to the passenger side; the locks on his car have been broken for years, and she can never get over the sight of watching him crawl through the seats to unlock the driver’s side from within. He sets his shopping bag on the floor behind the console, and motions for Blake to come closer. His car is one of the few things he’s had for longer than she’s known him. And somehow, the ancient thing still runs; though she’s had her doubts at times, particularly when it utters a truly guttural groaning noise in unpredictable intervals.

Once Sun unlocks the car, she settles into it with a sigh. Her fingers have gone numb from the weather, and Sun starts the ignition to blast the heating as high as it can go.

They shiver in silence as they wait for the warm air to come through the slotted vents, and she watches the snow showering down through the windshield. The quiet yawns between them, settling down like the heavy blanket of snow that is slowly covering the cars in front of them.

Eventually, she’s not sure if she’s imagining the warm air curling over her face as they continue to wait. It could be wishful thinking on her part; but she wants to get this over with before she explodes with nerves, and waiting for her face to regain feeling is taking too long. “So…” she trails off, uncertain of how to start.

“So,” Sun repeats, after a heartbeat too long. She turns to sit with folded legs across the carpeted seat, and faces him.

“If we’re going to do _this_ ,” she continues. She waves a finger in the space between them, gesturing at him and then at herself. Each word is drawn out slowly, as she speaks before thinking of what to say next. She toys with the zipper of her parka with her other hand, the metal squealing quietly between her fingers. “We have to lay down some ground rules. We can’t surprise each other or do something…couple-y, without agreeing on it.” She cringes as she finishes. _Couple-y?_ She chastises herself. _Come on, Blake._

Sun doesn’t seem to care about her poor choice of word, and nods along. “Sure,” he agrees, “so what’d you have in mind?”

Blake blinks, and then frowns. She hadn’t gotten this far in her coaching with the girls earlier today.

“I was…sort of hoping you’d thought of something already.”

Sun looks back at her, his expression unreadable as he scrutinizes her. Then he raises an eyebrow, and he shrugs. “I mean, whatever will convince your mom is fair game, right?” he asks. Blake nods in affirmation, and he continues. “Is there anything you want to be off-limits?”

Off-limits? She can think of a few things. Her mind plays through scenarios she’d thought about when the girls had been giving her their opinions. As she looks at Sun, her imagination fixates, once again, on his lips pressed against her own. A wandering thought walks slow circles through her mind, wondering if his lips would be soft or chapped, whether he would insistently press against her or if he would be feather-light and slow. How would his hands feel? She’s only ever hugged him, after all. Would he be as gentle as he is now? Or would that softness in him change; would he grip her arms tightly, leaving bruises in the shape of his fingers in his wake?

She’s experienced harshness before. She’s not keen on it again. And the part of her mind which is locked on the idea of kissing Sun hopes that he would be gentler than her previous romance. Some bruises still lingered, invisible beneath her skin. If Sun were capable of that—

When she catches herself in that train of thought, she flinches.

“Most things physical.” She speaks quickly, despite the rush of memory pressing against the fantasy of Sun. Any distraction will do, to disguise the way her eyebrows had twitched into a furrow that she wouldn’t be able to explain as simply feeling cold. Her voice rasps up her throat, and she swallows back the vision of clear blue eyes. “Hugging’s fine. Holding hands too. No kissing.”

Sun frowns as he listens, but nods nonetheless once she finishes. “Sounds good to me,” he says. “I was going to say the same thing if you didn’t.”

Blake returns his nod with one of her own, and flexes her fingers. Some feeling is returning to them, and they begin to sting as they sit in the warming car. She examines her knuckles with rapt attention as she ponders what to say next. Knowing her mother, they’re going to need an intricate backstory, with watertight explanations. Kali will want to know every detail, and won’t accept anything less than the full story.

“Is Mom gonna ask about us?”

Blake looks up in a flash, and meets Sun’s eyes. She hadn’t expected him to catch on to her suspicion so quickly, and she opens her mouth. No sound comes out.

Sun scratches at the back of his neck as he watches her. “I just mean…is she gonna ask about our relationship? When we started dating, and all that?” he clarifies, mistaking her silence for confusion. He stretches his legs underneath the steering wheel as he waits for her response, and turns the vent at the side of the wheel to face him more directly.

She sighs. “Yeah, she will,” she says. “We’re going to need a detailed story. About everything. Our anniversary, the amount of dates we’ve been on, personal details…” Sun raises an eyebrow, but opts to look out the windshield.

“Personal details? Why would she want to know what her own daughter and her boyfriend are up to?”

His tone is low, insinuating something within the vagueness of his words. It takes a moment for Sun’s intended meaning to register with her, as she _is_ confused this time by what he’s saying; but once it does, she leans across the console to lightly tap the back of her hand against his shoulder. Her eyes have gone wide, and Sun chuckles as she groans.

“You dork! We don’t need to pretend like we’ve…you know, had sex,” she says. Her mouth trips over the last word, and she sees Sun twitch at its mention. He’s likely just as surprised as she is at the idea, and probably just as eager to move past the topic. It’s not something she had ever considered, and she’s not about to start now. “I meant…” she gestures absentmindedly, as if that would be enough to get her point across. “Like what our favorite colors are, or our favorite foods, what we know about each other’s lives growing up. Stuff like that.”

“She’s not going to care about that!” Sun sounds so sure of himself, and Blake pities his naivety. She’d been like him once; but Kali Belladonna is a force to be reckoned with, and she is driven by a need to know every last detail once she sets her sights on a target. As she stares at Sun, she wonders what she doesn’t know about him. What Kali would care to learn about him in her belief that he’s dating her daughter. She finds, to her surprise, that there is a fair amount; despite knowing Sun for over three years now, she realizes she can’t pinpoint certain aspects about him. His childhood has always been a murky topic. His family life as well, beyond the knowledge that his parents weren’t in the picture.

 _What don’t I know about Sun Wukong,_ she thinks, for the first time.

The longer she doesn’t affirm him, she sees his face fall. “…Isn’t she?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Sun grunts, and goes silent. The side of his face that she can see begins to close off, his expression growing unreadable. Her eyes stay on him as he looks over the expanse of the parking lot, studying the sharp planes of his profile. His cheeks are stained red from the cold, the tan of his skin slightly paler due to the winter sun. His hair is hopelessly tousled, blond strands sticking every possible direction atop his skull.

She wonders what is running through that mind of his. What had prompted him to be so willing to go along with this fake dating scheme?

 _“Any reason why he’d choose that, over a cruise through the Caribbean?”_ Sage’s question rumbles from the recesses of her memory, mirroring her own thought. She doesn’t know the answer; and she thinks, perhaps, Sun may not either.

“We have a week before we’ll be there,” she says. Part of her wants to reach across the space separating them. To do what…well, she isn’t sure. She blinks, and in that moment she realizes her fingers are stretching towards his shoulder. In a jerk, she pulls her hand back. She’ll have to settle for the softness of her voice, and hope that is enough to soothe whatever is worrying him. “We don’t have to plan everything right now. I just wanted to start, so we’d be prepared for next week.”

Sun remains quiet for a moment. His irises look pitch black in the dim light of the streetlamp outside. She feels cold tendrils creep underneath her sleeves, as she takes in the unusual tension that tightens his jaw.

“Sun?” She says his name just loud enough to get his attention.

He exhales slowly, and shakes his head. He rolls his shoulders once, and then he returns his attention to her. Whatever had overtaken him melts away when his eyes focus, and an apologetic smile washes over his face to remove the last traces of the darkness in his irises.“It’s…sounding a lot more complicated than I thought.” He laughs, and Blake feels a smile growing on her lips at the sound.

“Mom is really thorough…which doesn’t work well for us.”

Sun shrugs at that. “Well, like you said. We’ve got a week to figure something out.”

Blake’s eyes dart over his face. His mouth and his eyebrows are relaxed, and he looks fine enough to her as she studies him. She leans back in her seat, and then she sighs. “Are you sure you want to do this? It’s not too late to back out.”

Sun is shaking his head before she finishes speaking. “I do!” he says. Blake closes her mouth as she trails off.

“I do,” he repeats, determinedly, “I just didn’t think we’d have to come up with a whole origin story, and script, and all this stuff. But I definitely want to help. And besides, I told you! Being around Neptune while he’s trapped on a boat would be a nightmare.”

Blake laughs, the sound muffled by their carpeted surroundings. Sun grins back, and with that smile, the cold worry melts from her skin. She shuffles in her seat to face the windshield again; and to her dismay she finds that the light snow they had encountered when they had first left the apartment is turning into a fully-fledged snowstorm. The parking lot is obscured by a sheet of white for a few feet in every direction, and the streetlights are dim behind the haze of snow.

“We can talk about this more tomorrow, if that’s okay,” she offers, “but I should get home.” She points to the digital clock on the dashboard, where she realizes it’s well past midnight. Weiss is probably blowing up her phone, wondering where she is in this weather.

“You can stay the night, if you want. You shouldn’t drive in this.”

She knows he’s right, as she watches the wall of snow building higher before her eyes. Still, the last thing she wants to do is impose on him. After everything else he’s doing for her, part of her can’t just accept his offer willingly. Even if she’s lost track of the amount of times she’s slept over at the boys’ apartment. “That’s okay with you? It’s so last minute…”

“Eh…” Sun waves her protestation off. “No worries. I’ll take the couch. Perks of being the guy who’s paying most of the rent—“

“—You get your own room,” she interjects. She’s heard this enough times from him that she doesn’t need to hear him brag about his own room again.

Sun grins at her approvingly, his eyes bright in the gloom of the car. “Yup! And I’ve told you, it’s yours whenever you want it.”

Blake eyes him as he reaches into the backseat to grab his bag of food. Once he has it secured, he pulls up, and takes his keys out of the ignition. She already mourns the loss of the warm air brushing across her face, but she doesn’t voice her complaint as Sun takes a deep breath, and leans to the side. “Ready?” he asks, and rests a hand on the door handle beside him.

She mirrors him, and straightens her shoulder. The car is so warm. Maybe she could convince him to stay here instead…

“Alright, let’s go,” she says.

They burst into the storm. The snow immediately bites into her skin, stinging and sharp against her exposed face. She gasps at the chill, and reaches up to pull her hood over her head as she slams the car door shut behind her. In the time it takes for her to shuffle to the front of the car, Sun is waiting for her, and together they hurry towards the looming shadow of the apartment on the other end of the parking lot.

She laughs at the amount of times Sun nearly loses his balance. The snow reaches up to their ankles, and there’s a thin layer of ice between their feet and the asphalt. The plow trucks won’t reach this part of campus for hours yet, should the storm keep up; if she gets lucky, maybe her classes will be cancelled. By the time they reach the stairs, Sun is cursing the entire northern hemisphere for its climate. They rush up the stairs with their hair frozen and shimmering with ice droplets; she had given up on shielding herself from the snow, and once they reached the apartment door, she turns to look out over the distance they had covered.

In the moment, it had felt like they had ran farther than the tiny space she was looking at. The lines of their footsteps break up the uniformity of the otherwise pristine snow blanketing the landscape, and her eyes can still trace the dark line to where the outline of Sun’s car was barely a shadow in the night. Behind her, his keys ring together as he searches for the one to let them into the apartment.

The moment she hears the door swing inward on its unoiled hinges she spins, and follows Sun inside.

“Sweet, sweet warmth,” Sun sighs, and cards his fingers through his frozen hair. “After so long in the tundra, I never thought we’d make it back to civilization alive.”He tugs off his sneakers, and tosses them to the side. They land, haphazardly, amongst the pile of similarly discarded shoes congregated by the door. She takes more care in removing her boots, and lines them primly on the other side of the entryway. Her parka goes on the coatrack hanging from the door a moment later.

Further down the entranceway, the sound of running water cuts off. A moment later, Neptune’s head peeks out of the archway leading into the kitchen. “Dude, we saw you two sitting in your car,” he calls out.

Sun follows the sound of Neptune’s voice with his bag of meals clutched close. Blake follows shortly after, and passes the kitchen to enter the living room. Scarlet is sitting in the chair she had occupied all evening, with earbuds in to block out the rest of the chaos around him. Sage is nowhere to be seen, and when Blake looks down the darkened hallway leading to the bedrooms, she realizes that the door to his room is closed.

In the minutes she takes to debate whether to wait for Sun to emerge from the kitchen or not, Scarlet takes notice of her. He removes one of his earbuds, and fixes her with an emerald gaze.

“Hey Blake,” he says. His accent is soft as he talks, and she leans against the back of the couch Sage had brought into the apartment to face him. She offers him a small smile.

“Win anything tonight?” Her smile grows when Scarlet rolls his eyes. Behind her, Neptune and Sun’s voices float out of the kitchen, speaking in hushed tones.

After a moment of listening, she turns her focus back to the boy in front of her. “I’m going to be staying over, if that’s okay,” she says. She can’t parse what the two boys are talking about, even as she strains to hear them while she speaks.

Scarlet raises an eyebrow. “You don’t need my permission for that.”

“Still. Just a warning.”

He flips his hair out of his eyesight in lieu of a response. The vibrant crimson of it is stronger than she’s seen it recently; he must have gotten it dyed again, she thinks. When he returns his earbud to his ear, she turns her back on him to face the kitchen.

When Sun still hasn’t come out, she makes her way to the bathroom with a yawn on her lips. When she flicks the light switch on, the cramped space illuminates with one bulb hanging over the sink; the other two beside it have long since burnt out. The countertop is strewn with deodorant sticks, empty toothpaste tubes, and combs. In the medicine cabinet, however, she finds the small bag of toiletries she keeps for the times she does stay over untouched by the boys’ chaos.

After cleaning up, to the best of her limited ability, she makes her way back to the living room.

Sun finally came out of the kitchen, and he looks up from his phone when he notices Blake approaching. He nods behind her, and wordlessly leads the way to his bedroom. “Do you have any clothes I can borrow?” she asks as they go. Sun’s hand twitches at his side, and he doesn’t answer as they enter the bedroom, with the door left ajar behind them. He flicks a light switch by the door to turn on the lamp beside his bed.

When she had first seen his room, Blake hadn’t expected Sun to be as spartan as his room implied; and not much has changed since then. A double mattress is situated beneath the window and shoved into the opposite corner of the room, covered with dark blue sheets, and a small desk is set against the foot with textbooks and notepads piled neatly across the surface. His closet is the only thing in the room as disorganized as the shared bathroom, with clothes spilling out from the parted double doors in a tidal wave of fabric. Beside the pile, a full length mirror is hung up on the wall.

She waits in front of the bedroom door while Sun walks across the empty space to the closet, and digs out a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt for her to use. “These should be clean,” he explains, and holds them out for her inspection.

She smiles, but takes the clothes even as she makes a show of holding them at arms length. “Should be?” she repeats. Sun swats at her arm, and chuckles.

He goes to dig around in the closet again, and when he comes up empty-handed, he shoots her an apologetic look. “I’ll leave you a towel in the bathroom for the morning. Need anything now?” he asks, and when Blake shakes her head, he moves for the door.

She clutches the clothes close as she watches him go. “Thank you,” she says quietly. Sun turns to face her, holding his own pajamas for the night in one hand, the other resting on the doorknob. The only sound in the apartment is the sink in the kitchen, a quiet hum in the background and barely noticeable. Sun leans back on his heel to watch her, and she tugs at the sleeve of the t-shirt as she waits to see if he’ll respond. Her head tilts as she watches him, and her foot wavers as she hesitates to take a step towards him.

“Of course,” he finally says, and she stops. When he grins at her again, she feels a smile of her own spreading over her lips of their own volition. She continues forward, crossing the room until she’s before him in the doorway with a more assured step.

“Goodnight,” she murmurs, and places her hand on the other side of the door. She stares up at him as she comes to a stop.

Sun nods at her. “Goodnight, Blake,” he echoes, and then he shuts the door with only a whisper of wind behind him. It takes her a moment to leave the door. She looks at the clothes in her hand, the baggy white t-shirt that smells like Sun, and back towards the panel separating her from him.

This plan of hers has, in some ways, opened up a door she hadn’t known existed until just now. The clothes in her hands don’t simply feel like borrowing from a friend, now; something has come through the other side. Something that is warm and fluttering, and spreading slowly through her chest like sunlight over the morning horizon. She presses her fingers against the wood in front of her. Yes, a door has been opened, only slightly. The question is, can she close it once she needs to? What else is going to come through from the other side?

Blake can’t focus on that now. She tears away from the door with a huff, and is quick to change out of her soaking clothes into the dry ones Sun had provided her. She leaves hers in a pile by the door; she’ll get to them in the morning, she reasons.

But as she climbs into Sun’s bed and reaches for the lamp, she finds herself surrounded by him. His scent is everywhere, she realizes.

She had never noticed that before.

Her brow furrows, and she shuts the lamp off with a sharp click. The room swaths itself in darkness, and she curls up underneath the sheets, breathing deeply. _I’m just tired_ , she reasons, and a yawn forms around her mouth as if conjured into being. The blankets are heavy and soft, and she focuses on that sensation until she can no longer think, instead of how much Sun’s scent envelops her on all sides.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for how long this took to put out! I wasn't entirely satisfied with the original way this chapter opened up, and rewriting it took ages to slog through. The beginning is now my favorite part of the chapter though; Blake and Sun decided to derail my plans for the rest of this when they decided that she would stay the night at his place, so the ending portion may seem too abrupt. Please let me know your thoughts!


	3. December 14th, Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sun meets the parents.

“Okay, so just to get the story straight: we’ve been dating for a couple months, our anniversary is September 14th if they ask…uh, our first date was a study session at my place, we ordered take-out because I didn’t have the ingredients I needed to make dinner like I’d wanted to, and…”

Blake tunes Sun out as he continues to rattle off their agreed-upon backstory, his voice fading into a low murmur in the background. She’s heard him recite these lines twice on their eighteen hour trek, locked in her car and with only his words to distract from her cramping muscles. He sounds less like he’s trying to remember the details of a casually developing relationship, and more like he’s trying to memorize a script.

His uncertainty concerns her, though she hasn’t told him this yet. She doesn’t want to worry him…however, she’s not confident that this won’t go up in flames the moment they get questioned. And as they draw nearer to their final destination, her fingers tense around the steering wheel as she drives them up the long, winding driveway leading to her childhood home.

If there’s one thing she’s missed about Florida, it’s that she doesn’t have to be bundled in twelve layers of clothing in the wintertime. She wasn’t meant for the cold landscapes that surround her campus, always feeling just enough out of place amongst the mountains and the snow. The moment they had crossed the state line a weight had lifted from her shoulders, and her foot had pressed a touch firmer on the gas pedal than before.

The wind coming in from her open windows brushes through her hair with invisible, gentle fingers which soothe the bundle of concern at the pit of stomach. It’s a welcome comfort while Sun continues to recite the circumstances of their relationship.

Such as it is, anyway.

Realistically, she knows there’s nothing to be worried about. This is Sun she’s working with, and she trusts him. It’s not even the end of the world if her parents piece together that she and Sun aren’t really together. If that happens, Kali will tease them mercilessly about it for months, but that has to be the worst case scenario here. She only needs to keep reminding herself of that.

Sun’s still going strong even as they round the final bend to the house with sunlight streaming through the open windows. “…And your favorite color is yellow, but not neon, anything neon just gets on your nerves, you prefer it more like a sunset kind of yellow…what would you even call that, anyway? Uh, you prefer to sleep on your side—”

“I doubt my parents are going to quiz you on how I sleep,” Blake says, and her ears grow warm as she says it. Sun cuts himself off when she speaks, and out of the corner of her eye she sees him shoot her an embarrassed grin. She smirks, and decides to play along. It’ll ease the butterflies trying to escape her stomach if she focuses on anything other than the impending vacation. “But how did you guess that?”

“You’ve never slept on your back when you’ve stayed over.”

Sun is quick to respond, like he prepared that answer before she’d even thought of the question, and she allows herself a moment to take her eyes off the driveway, and looks at him. He’s lounging in the passenger seat, one leg tucked close to his chest and arms draped across his knee, and she’s momentarily distracted by the way some of the golden strands of his hair dance in the breeze, how his hair contrasts against the faded green t-shirt he’s wearing.

She turns her attention back to the driveway. “So you watch me while I sleep? That isn’t creepy at all,” she says, and Sun is quick to sputter out a long string of denials. He stops when she laughs, but she doesn’t really notice; they’re finally turning the final bend, and her childhood home slowly comes into full view from behind the line of dripping live oak foliage and spike-leaved shrubbery.

At first, all she notices are the familiar trappings of the house. The pristine, white siding and shingles shine in the sunlight, making the Victorian exterior gleam in contrast to the deep mahogany set of double doors, raised above the ground by a high staircase, and framed by delicate wooden posts on either side. A thin fence which contains the large porch holds a small, cushioned bench and set of chairs beneath a pair of windows behind it. The dark trimmings which frame them, and the rest of the windows dotting the exterior in clear glass, have been freshly painted. The paneled foundation, accentuated with pale red brick pillars, peeks out from the cover of the landscaping that has been carefully cultivated into an explosion of rounded leaves which shade the multicolored flowers with unfurled petals, and beneath them, tendrils of ivy which curl and weave like threads of silk amongst the brush.

Though despite the sight of the house growing larger, she doesn’t feel the homesickness of the past few months wash away, as her eyes register what blankets the house.

“That’s…a lot,” says Sun.

Blake takes a deep breath, and sighs softly.

“…Yeah.”

She’ll never know why her mother insists on going all out with the decorating. The house is tucked well away from the main road, and the only people who really see it are herself, Kali, and Ghira— and Sun.

Has it really only ever been Sun who’s come into her memories like this, who’s made a home for himself where only her family has ever been? It’s a thought that had never occurred to her, but as she stares out the windshield at the building looming ever closer, she realizes how odd it is, that he fits so easily within the bright sunshine and airy rooms she’s known all her life.

It’s a thought that she simply can’t allow herself to dwell on, not when she knows what they’re about to undergo for the next three weeks. She can’t put a word to what it means for Sun to be among the few people who have been to her childhood home. The importance of what that entailed fit into the narrative they were trying to craft, piecing together all too well for her comfort— so she instead forces her attention on what kind of winter wonderland her mother has crafted in the heart of the sunshine state.

It looks like the perfect setting for a Hallmark movie. All it’s missing is real snow, since the winter-themed decorations clash garishly with the bright Florida weather. Though somehow, Kali always found a way to make do. Countless bags’ worth of fake snow, in the form of fluffed cotton, dot the sides of the house in clumps of fuzzy, shapeless piles. There are green wreathes adorning every window, made out of faux pine needles which rain plastic foliage down to the driveway and the roof of the front porch. White fairy lights and LED icicles are strung across the eaves and draped over the bannister. There’s a speaker hidden somewhere in the lush landscaping which seems set to loop through a playlist of winter-themed music. Kali must have decided to play it just for her and Sun’s arrival, because _All I Want for Christmas Is You_ is on; and it seems too well-timed to her, to simply be a coincidence.

Blake groans when she realizes Kali even brought out the horrifying inflatable Santa decoration— which has always seemed much larger in her head, but really isn’t any taller than her tiny freshman dorm room— and it has the place of honor in the center of the roundabout which sits before the front door. It is surrounded by, what she can only guess to be, a summoning circle of lit up red-and-white candy canes and prancing reindeer statues.

 _Forget a Hallmark movie,_ she thinks. _It looks like the Christmas spirit threw up all over the house_.

“I wonder if Mom likes Christmas much,” Sun teases, as she pulls the car over to the steps leading to the front door. Mariah Carey is singing away in the background. Blake has never hated another song more than she does now, as the words _I just want you for my own_ weave their way into her ears with overly emphasized longing.

There isn’t a doubt in her head that her mother planned this. She can be calculated when she wants to be, and Blake knows her mother’s winter playlist is comprised of more than a hundred songs. Still, for as much as Mariah Carey is making her regret ever returning to this house for break, she’s surprised— and more than a little relieved— that there she hasn’t spotted any mistletoe hanging above the front door. All that decorates the porch is garland, hanging heavy with plastic ornaments and string lights. Though she doesn’t entirely discount the idea there could be some of that cursed plant elsewhere in the house.

But instead of voicing her suspicion, she rolls her eyes and says, “What gave it away?”

Sun doesn’t answer, and she finally slows to a halt before the front stairs. They sit in silence, and they both stare up at the double doors for a moment. Blake half-expects they’ll fling open on their own, beckoning them further into this holiday theme park that Kali has crafted. Perhaps little elves will come out to greet them, singing carols like overly-cheerful Oompa Loompas. She can picture a red carpet rolling out across the porch and bouncing down the stairs, as the miniature nightmares throw red and green confetti in their wake. She wouldn’t put it past the realm of possibility at this point.

When that doesn’t happen, Blake sighs, and moves to get out of the car.

“We’ll be fine,” she says to Sun, even as that ever-familiar weight settles in her stomach again. “We’ll just do what feels natural. Don’t try to force it.”

If Sun hears her, he doesn’t acknowledge what she said. So, she hoists herself out of the driver’s seat in silence.

Sun, meanwhile, is out of the car and opening the trunk before she can take a step in that direction, and he takes hold of their luggage out without a word. She moves to take her bag from him, as burdened as he is by the large duffel bags stuffed underneath his arms. He neatly sidesteps her, and throws her a grin when she presses forward, holding her hand out expectantly. She glowers, but it’s no use; Sun is already moving towards the porch in quick strides, and she realizes she can’t be bothered to fight him over this. Not when the stiff line of his shoulders is all she can see.

She doesn’t understand _why_ he’s so worried; it’s not like this is real, after all. Just a few weeks of some close contact to appease her mom, and then they can go back to the laid-back friendship they’ve enjoyed for so long. Absolutely nothing to worry about. They just have to make sure they stick to the story they created.

It’s a mantra she chants in her mind as she trails behind him.

Her parents like Sun. This isn’t some boy they’ve never met who’s coming into their home. Sun has been here numerous times over the years, has stayed in their guest room and eaten their food, has made himself as much a part of the home as her or her parents. This is surely no different from the summer breaks he’s come for, or the Thanksgiving dinner he crashed when Sage had been unable to bring Sun home with him. There’s nothing out of the ordinary…if one ignored the whole “fake dating” aspect of this. It isn’t unusual whatsoever, she reasons. Just another time where Sun’s stayed for a break. And really, they shouldn’t have to act much different as it is. They practically _are_ dating already, in some ways—

Blake trips over the last step before the landing. She chokes on her breath while she catches her balance, but manages to pass it off as a cough.

 _This is going to be a long three weeks,_ she thinks, repeating the thought that has been running through her head since Sun had agreed to this scheme.

The pair of them pause before the set of doors, and Sun moves to stand a step behind her. The gesture gives her the impression that he’s readily throwing her to the wolves with a smile on his face. When she looks back at him, he even makes that exact expression at her, and he accentuates it with a thumbs-up in a show of support. It causes her to hesitate, but she doesn’t linger on it when she turns away from him, raises her hand, and raps her knuckles against the frosted glass pane which sit within each doors’ face. She takes a small step backwards, and holds her fist to her chest.

Only a few heartbeats pass before she can hear commotion from inside. The clatter of ceramic is followed by footsteps padding hurriedly over tiled flooring, and her mother’s voice calling for Ghira. She barely has time to glance at Sun over her shoulder, though she’s unable to assess the expression on his face, before one of the doors is flung open to reveal Kali Belladonna.

Her face is flushed, a dusting of red beneath her tan skin, and she already bears a wide smile to greet her daughter and guest. Blake notices her jeans are caked with mud at the knees, and her loose t-shirt is similarly covered in grass stains. Kali doesn’t seem to care about the state of her attire as she immediately bolts for Blake to envelop her in a hug, wrapping tightly around her. She’s quick to reciprocate, and her mother runs her hands up the length of her arms.

“Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to get here so soon,” Kali says, and she pulls away to look Blake in the eye. She gestures to her clothing with a frown marring the kindly lines of her face, and continues. “You didn’t even give me the chance to freshen up! Couldn’t you have waited another twenty minutes?”

Blake rolls her eyes while her mother continues to fuss at her, though she allows the hands roaming her shoulders to stay, and she shrugs under the light pressure of Kali’s fingers.

“Would you like us to leave and come back so we can try this again?” she asks flatly, smiling as she speaks, and Kali waves her off. Her attention doesn’t stay on her daughter for long in any case, lasting just enough for her to take another quick hug before she pulls away to peer over Blake’s shoulder at the star of this little show.

Blake has thought, more often than she’d have liked, about what Kali’s reaction would be to realizing Sun is her “mystery boyfriend” over the course of the last week. She’s mulled over numerous possibilities, ranging from excited shrieking to endless questions about why, when, and how this had happened. She’s prepared multiple answers depending on whatever mood strikes Kali once she realizes who Blake has brought in the guise of being her boyfriend. But despite her best attempts, she can only ever guess what her mother will do at a given time. All she had known, for sure, was that Kali’s behavior would surpass anything she expected.

And she certainly doesn’t disappoint now.

Blake remains silent as Kali’s hand comes up to cover her mouth. Her eyes crinkle at the corners, and then widen in recognition, and spark with undisguised delight. Her smile grows slowly, a flower blooming in the spring sun, so wide Blake can see it peeking past her palm and fingers.

“Oh,” she breathes out, taking a step towards Sun.

“Oh, this is…” She gives herself a small shake, and immediately turns her back on both Sun and Blake to shout into the house.

“Ghira! You’re going to want to see this, hon!”

Blake turns back to Sun while Kali’s distracted, with a frown on her lips. Her brow furrows as she meets his eyes, and she notices he’s wearing yet another sheepish grin. He sets down both of their luggage, and shoves one of his hands into the pocket of his jeans, while the other waves in greeting.

“Hey Mom,” he finally says, and Kali turns her attention back to him. Too quick for Blake to see, she crosses the distance between them. Her steps are silent on the floorboards, and before Blake can register it, Kali immediately envelops Sun in a hug that Blake suspects is just as strong, if not stronger than the one she had been given. Sun returns the hug without hesitation, both arms coming to wrap around Kali’s back, and he doesn’t move until she pulls away.

Blake can’t see what her mother’s expression is, but she can hear the smile in her tone when she says, almost shrilly, “You two have some explaining to do!”

Kali swats at Sun’s arm, and Blake stifles her own smile as she watches. But it’s quick to vanish entirely, when Kali rounds on Blake. Indeed, she is smiling, but there’s a glint in her golden eyes that Blake is immediately wary of. “Like why _you_ were so set on keeping this a secret, young lady! You had me worried you were bringing home some…creep!” She doesn’t wait for a response, and marches into the house with the air of a parent fully expecting her child to silently, obediently follow her.

Blake acquiesces, but not before shooting Sun a quick look and mouthing, _“You okay?”_ to him. He nods in return, picks up their luggage, and steadfastly moves to follow her mother. The moment they step across the threshold, however, she no longer pays any attention to what Kali may be doing. Her senses are assaulted with a cloying scent of vanilla, twining with heavy amounts of cinnamon. Her nose wrinkles as the scent winds its way into her mind.

She comes to a standstill in the small entryway, and her focus returns to Kali, who ascends the staircase in front of them in search of her father. “You kids can put your stuff in the family room,” Kali calls as she goes, “we can whip up a late lunch if you’d like, I’m sure you must be hungry!”

With that leave given to them, Blake leads the way further into the house. Sun sticks close to her back; and she feels very much the intruder in every room they pass through adorned in colorful ornaments and garland and lights, while she’s wearing the ratty black sweater and leggings that comprise her post-finals recovery wear.

The narrow hallway branches off on her right into her father’s study, where a spotless set of french doors close the room off to her and Sun. Through the glass she can see the room is empty, save for a massive desk that she had helped Ghira build, in her early teens.

She can’t see any as they go, but there are speakers in the house too, playing the same playlist of winter-themed carols on low volume. She only notices it, however, when she catches herself humming along to Jingle Bells, and she makes it her goal right then and there to find those speakers, and silence them, as soon as possible.

When they get to the family room, Blake pauses. It’s vast, and the smell of vanilla is still strong here. But she can at least thank the wall-length windows, which open up the far wall to the screened in porch and the yard beyond, for providing an outlet for the cloying scent. A stone-covered fireplace adorns the wall on their right-hand side, with a pair of long, spotless couches facing it. A multi-colored rug spreads out underneath in a vast expanse, covering a majority of the cool flooring. The kitchen is open to the room as well, and Blake can see rolls of pre-made cookie dough stacked on top of the island counters, ready to be popped and set into the oven at any moment.

Sun dumps their bags onto one of the cream-colored couches with a sigh of relief. He throws himself beside them straight after, his legs stretching out over the floor with comfortable abandon. Blake rolls her eyes, and settles onto the other couch. “I could’ve taken one,” she reminds him. He shrugs, and his gaze rolls up to the ceiling to study the plain white surface in great detail.

She, meanwhile, studies him.

Her memory rewinds, watching his eyes dart over the blank canvas over their heads. Sights and sounds from the past flow forth from the recesses of time, and as she looks at Sun lounging on the couch, she remembers the first time he had come to her family home. He had been tense, far more than he was now. With a hornet’s nest buzzing in his bones and fit to burst forth, practically vibrating out of his skin as he’d stood on the front porch in a pool of spring sunlight with a backpack of his belongings slung over his shoulder.

It was their freshman spring break. Sun had wanted to go to the beach. Blake had wanted to take him. It was only a coincidence that he had gotten on the same plane as her on a round-trip to Miami; she’d never directly asked him to come along. Surely she hadn’t known he was booking a flight the same day she had been, as they sat in his dorm room with their laptops open to the same airline. It was pure circumstance that when she’d gone to see him before she left for the week, his roommates told her he’d already left for the airport.

Coincidence or not, she hadn’t been surprised when, as she walked down the aisle of the plane, studying the minuscule placards dictating where she would find the one labelled “B9”, she had heard a familiar voice gleefully call out her name. And thus she found her seat, directly across the aisle from Sun’s, who was crammed into his chair while his neighbor spilled over the armrest to have his cheek millimeters from Sun’s shoulder, already asleep and snoring into his ear. Despite that, he had looked like he’d won a seat in first class as she settled into her own chair, devoid of neighbors and leaving her with a clear sight to the window.The entire flight, she’d snuck glances at him as she read through one of the many books she had packed for that trip.

Sun had heard stories she’d told him about her father. And though she loved him very much, back then, her relationship with him had been…rife with tension, with misunderstandings, and that had clouded her descriptions of Ghira Belladonna to a very wary, far less confident Sun.

She had been pleasantly surprised when Kali had accepted Sun with warm, welcome arms. And that she had strong-armed Ghira into playing nice as well, with a razor-sharp grin on her lips and the promise of painful nagging in her amber eyes. All four of them had gone to the beach that year, staying clear of her fellow college students and standing in the ankle-deep shallows to dig for sea glass among the clean beige sand.

 _That was…fun,_ she thinks. The first time she could remember enjoying herself since she had moved to BSU. And as she watches Sun now, she can still recall the way his eyes lit up as he held out a shard of smooth, opaque glass for her to see, the verdant green rock shaped like an odd little heart if she squinted to look at it at just the right angle, the way he had told her to.

She smiles as she watches him now. That piece of glass was likely long gone beneath the waves. Sun had probably left it back at the beach; but she can still have the memory of it, if nothing else.

And the memory fades slowly, quietly, like the hush of the tide washing back towards the ocean. Various thumps and lowered voices float to the surface, reaching downward from the second floor. She holds her breath, looking to the ceiling as though she could see through it, as though she could see her parents as they come to play along with this plan she had concocted, and exhales with a heavy sigh.

“…Okay— okay, I know! You don’t need to push me, I’m going…” Ghira’s voice rumbles, low and exasperated, through the floorboards.

Blake notices Sun stiffen on the sofa, and she leans forward to catch his eye while Ghira’s footfalls grow closer in the hallway. “Hey,” she says.

Sun tilts his head to meet her stare. She holds his gaze. Her parents’ footsteps draw closer, echoing down the staircase, but she pays the hallway no mind. She tries to reassure him through her eyes alone; even as she tries to do the same for herself. _It’s time,_ she wants to say, _we’ll be okay, just remember the details._ She hopes he gets the message as the footsteps approach them from the landing.

He smiles at her.

“We’ve got this,” he says back, his voice almost a whisper underneath the holiday music.

She smiles back.

And that’s when Ghira enters the room.

..:|:..

Ghira Belladonna is a tall, imposing man. He never needs to put on airs to intimidate those he wants to scrutinize; his presence alone is enough to make one second-guess anything they may say. His well-groomed appearance is enough to tell people he means business, from the trimmed beard he maintains to the carefully combed hair he always sports. Blake may not look like her father in size, but she’d always heard how she had inherited his countenance, his silken ebony hair, his demeanor. But no matter how intimidating he may be, even to her, he is patient, and quiet. Rarely fazed by anything that happens around him.

Except for now, it would seem.

And that’s only partly because Kali is grinning widely at his side, as if Christmas morning has come three weeks early.

Standing in the archway leading into the front entrance, Ghira looks hunched over himself, as though he’s stood in another room; one where his head brushes the ceiling instead of where they actually are, in a room where the ceiling vaults up two stories and the walls aren’t closing in on him. His arms are crossed, the clean lines of his white button-up shirt crinkling as he shifts on his feet. He stares resolutely out of the windows on the opposite wall, as if determined to ignore everything else around him in favor of watching the woods bordering the backyard. They must be very entertaining; he doesn’t look away for several long, silent moments. Blake stifles a laugh as Kali lightly raises up on her toes, and impatiently taps her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

She rises to her feet, shoots another quick look at Sun— who has turned in his seat to look over the back of the couch, and is shielding most of his body behind the cushions— and makes her way to her parents. Kali steps towards the kitchen as she approaches, and Blake doesn’t miss the wink that is tossed her way. She turns her focus back to her father, who still refuses to look into the room.

“Hey Dad,” she greets, and comes to a stop before him.

Ghira’s eyes flick to her once she speaks. His expression shifts; to anyone who hadn’t had him for a father, he would look strange, with how his normally stoic features light up. The smallest of smiles upturn his lips, and a spark ignites in his amber eyes as he looks at his daughter. Blake smiles back, and before she has a chance to blink, her father’s arms are around her. He smells like home, like the hardwood and garden soil she remembers from her childhood years; she sinks into the feeling.

“Welcome home,” he says into her hair, and she’s quick to hug him back.

And then she pulls back, with her heart tapping a staccato beat in her chest. Behind her, she can hear Sun shifting on the couch. She hopes he feels calmer than she does; her face is already growing warmer as Ghira scrutinizes her. But standing between him and her father, she can’t help but feel like she’s the last line of defense for him. It’s an amusing sensation, if nothing else.

“Good drive?” he finally asks. He seems intent on staring at her for as long as he can manage, and she shrugs.

“Long, boring…” Ghira nods along as she details the trip in as short amount of words as possible, very much engrossed.

She trails off into silence. In the kitchen, a door clicks open, ringing through the room much louder than it should. She rocks back onto her heels, waiting for Ghira to make his next move, and casts a glance to where her mother is putting a pie dish into the glowing depths of the oven. She crosses her arms as she waits.

Her father chastely clears his throat. “Well, that’s…good.” He rolls his shoulders, and sighs.

The silence practically leaps in the air around them to make itself known.

“So…”

“Well—”

They both pause as they cut each other off, and Ghira smiles again.

“Well,” he continues, “let me see who our…guest is.”

She doesn’t quite know if she likes the hesitation in his voice, the way the word “guest” sounds anything but inviting in his tone. But nonetheless, she backs away. It hadn’t escaped her that she was positioned in just the right way to block the couch Sun was bunkered behind, hiding from Ghira’s view; though she’s coming to regret it, as she realizes that it just meant prolonging Ghira’s realization that it was, indeed, his least favorite adopted son sitting in his living room, playing the part of her very much real, _definitely_ not pretend, boyfriend.

 _Oh, this was a very bad idea,_ she thinks. But it’s too late now. And as she strides back to the couch she had occupied before her parents had entered the room, she hopes that Ghira plays along with this for Sun’s sake, instead of hers.

The room is still eerily quiet; only the breeze can be heard from the screened porch outside, and Kali has gone silent in the kitchen. Blake’s skin crawls as she waits for her father’s reaction, her back still turned on the man in question. Any moment now, she’s going to hear him say something, anything— anything would be good right about now, with the silence is ringing in her ears. She feels warm enough that smoke could be curling from her skin.

She turns to face the rest of the room, preparing to return to her seat and whatever fallout is about to unfold behind her. In the kitchen, a snort is quickly muffled and cut off.

Once she turns her eyes focus on Ghira, standing just behind the back of the other couch, and Sun. And she watches as the two engage in the most dumbfounded staring contest she’s ever seen.

That’s the only way she can describe it, really.

For how reserved he usually is, Ghira is practically slack jawed as he looks at Sun; His eyebrows have raised— by mere millimeters, to be fair, though it may as well be astronomical— towards his hairline. His arms dangle at his sides, forgotten and useless, as he stares down at the boy who is curled into a ball and clutching her duffle bag as if he were a drowning man, holding a life preserver in the dead of night.

 _Sun’s hair is distracting_ , she thinks. _It’s far too long._ He needs to get a haircut, and her eyes trace some of the ends that are starting to reach down and hide the back of his neck. No wonder Ghira can’t look away.

Because it’s too long, of course. Too long and golden for the Belladonna family, with their ebony hair.

Her eyes flick away from the stare-down when she hears another sound come from the kitchen, and she meets Kali’s crinkled gaze from across the room. She’s grinning, teeth flashing in the bright ceiling lights, and she gives a thumbs up when she realizes her daughter is looking at her. Blake is unclear if that means Kali thinks this is going well, or if she’s trying to be supportive in the face of a dazed Ghira; but if it’s the former choice, she’s afraid to know what “going poorly” would look like here. If it’s the latter…well, her father being caught off-guard happens so rarely. There’s little precedent for it, until now.

When Ghira finally speaks, his voice is flat. Too flat, in fact. “…Sun.”

There’s an undercurrent of confusion there, a question asked with a statement. An unmistakable disbelief encased behind the leveled way he spoke. She turns her focus back to the men and, once she does, Ghira finally blinks. It seems to be the first in the minute or so since he had laid eyes on the boy she’d brought home. She doesn’t think Sun will vanish off the couch no matter how many times he blinks, however.

Sun raises a hand away from his death grip on her luggage, and he shakes it in a pitiful wave.

“Hey, Papa B.,” he says. Is she hearing him right? Does his voice sound an octave higher?

She doesn’t get the chance to give it much more thought; Ghira’s eyes find hers in a flash, and the bemusement in his stare pins her to the floor. He looks at her like he wants her to confirm that this is a hoax; which it is, of course. She can’t say that though, much to his unknowing dismay.

“So this is your—”

 _Nope_. She grins, the smile splitting her face in two and straining with the effort. She needs to cut him off before he confirms it aloud. If it needs to be spoken, she’d rather be the one to do it. Damage control, and all that. “Yep! Sun’s my…” she pauses, _hesitates_ , hoping she can say this and not sound like she’s faking it, “…boyfriend!” She spreads her arms out towards the boy in question, gesturing to him. Showing him off, praying Ghira will take his astounded eyes off of her. Whatever description would get him to look away works for her.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Kali calls from the kitchen, and the genuine glee in her voice is enough that Blake hopes it masks the uncertainty in her own declaration. She’s quick to sit back down on her couch, folding herself into a ball by the armrest to make herself smaller. Ghira’s gaze flicks back to Sun, then to Blake, then Sun again, like his mind is working overtime to piece them together.

He looks like he’s swallowed a lemon, but at least he isn’t _upset_ , Blake thinks.

After a few more endless moments of dividing his attention between her and Sun, Ghira quite literally _shakes_ himself from his stupor, and twitches towards the couches as if he intends to sit with them. He hesitates, raising on the balls of his feet as he teeters between the one she’s sat on and the one Sun is huddled into. She watches the moment he settles on neither; and instead, makes a quick escape towards the kitchen, where Kali hurriedly whispers at him. She doesn’t take her eyes off of Sun, though. And when he twists in his seat to face her she quickly looks to her parents, making sure Kali is sufficiently fussing enough at Ghira to notice, before giving him a quick nod and a quicker smile.

Sun looks like he’s narrowly avoided getting hit by a train, wide-eyed and white-knuckled from where his other hand grips the canvas bag, but he smiles back at her nonetheless. Her heart begins tapping that familiar staccato rhythm, and she leans forward in her seat to bring herself closer to him, across the distance between the couches. Sun leans forward too, playing his part as an equal conspirator.

“That went better than I’d thought,” she says quietly.

“Are you kidding?” Sun’s quick to respond, whisper-shouting loud enough that she grimaces, and waves her hand down to get him to be quiet. He complies, though not by much. “I thought he was going to grab me by the neck, Blake!”

She smirks. “But he didn’t, did he?” she asks. Sun blinks at her.

“You thought he’d try to _choke_ me?!”

“No—!” she stifles a laugh as he grabs tighter to her bag, even though she cringes at the sad, crumpled mess that’s in store for her once she unpacks. Her clothes, folded so neatly in preparation for this trip, are certainly going to be a casualty of his death grip. “I didn’t think that.”

Sun sighs in relief. “That was the worst staring contest of my life.” He loosens his hold on her luggage, and swings the endless length of his legs off of the cushions to rest once again on the floor.

Well, at least she wasn’t the only one who’d thought that. “Don’t get too comfortable, we’ve still got three weeks of this.”

The sigh Sun releases is enough of an answer for her; but she can accept the smile he still gives following it, catching sight of it out of the corner of her eye.

“What are you two whispering about?”

Blake stiffens, and leans back in her seat, feeling very much like she’s been caught red-handed despite having done nothing wrong. Her eyes shoot upward, away from what she barely registers as her blatant staring at Sun’s shins, to see her parents leaving the kitchen. Moving straight for the pair of them; Ghira looks no less confused than he had before he’d walked away, while Kali is smiling bright enough to look like she’d won the lottery.

“Go on you two, take one of the couches!” Kali continues, urgency raising her voice.

Blake switches her attention back to Sun, who looks to her for direction. Direction which she can’t give, seeing as there’s only one option. Even if she would very much like to _not_ choose it. But she can’t deny her mother this, not when she’s trying to pass this off as a genuine relationship. And it would seem odd, if she kept Sun at arm’s length at all times.

And Sun continues looking at her with gunmetal eyes, with something _else_ hidden behind them, as her parents bear down on them. Another question to layer atop the others he most certainly would be asking her throughout this three week event. _“_ _Is there anything you want to be off-limits?”_ his voice bounces around the inside of her skull like a tennis ball, and a memory follows in its wake, of one instance she had considered for this time; of the length of Sun’s body, pressing against her, shoulder to thigh. Her skin grows warm, and she watches as he unfurls his arms from around her black bag. He places it onto the floor with far more gentleness than he had afforded it during his staring match with her father. She doesn’t give his movement much focus.

Her parents are still approaching, still watching them, ready to inspect their performance. She meets Sun’s eyes again. _We’ve got this,_ she repeats silently.

And so she tears herself from the safety of her corner, shuffles across the empty space that had been her barrier, and slides between Sun and his luggage on the couch he had claimed. Except, _sliding_ is too graceful a description for what she does. In actuality, she _stumbles_ , and flops between Sun and his luggage. Too eager to seem natural, she trips over her feet as she dips to sit, and her eyes widen as she falls with the backs of her legs hitting the couch.

A hand wraps around her upper arm, guiding her. She looks to it once she settles against the dark blue bag beside her, her mind not yet registering that it’s truly there. Her eyes follow the arm connecting it to Sun’s shoulder, then traces upward to meet his eyes.

 _Are you serious,_ Blake admonishes. _You can’t even sit down right._ Her face and ears are burning up as Sun’s hand remains on her arm, and she hesitates before shaking his hold off, wrestling with the feel of his fingers over the thick fabric of her sweater. She gives him a quiet whisper of, “Thanks,” as she removes his hand, and looks warily towards her parents once she shifts away— her parents, who are sitting on the loveseat she had been on, and watching them both. Kali, enraptured and borderline starry-eyed, and Ghira, still in a state of shock.

The four of them make for a very disjointed group, she realizes as they sit in silence, staring at one another in the heavy sunlit air. Family reunions aren’t usually this awkward; or at least she thinks they aren’t. The previous times she’s returned home haven’t been this…tense. She shifts in her seat. Beside her, Sun quietly clears his throat.

She had been somewhat confident coming into this, knowing how comfortable she was with Sun, and he with her. They were always synchronous. She had counted on that, on their reliable friendship, to be enough for these few weeks. But as she watches her mother’s eyes dart between her and Sun, she begins to believe, she begins to _doubt_ , that this may have been a bad idea.

When someone finally chooses to break the silence, she’s surprised to hear Ghira’s voice first.

“So,” her father begins, “how were your finals?” He looks at her as he talks, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the person sitting close enough to her left arm to radiate a quiet heat through the fabric of her sweater.

She parts her lips to speak, but doesn’t get the chance to answer.

“Good!” Sun is quick to say— or rather, _chirp_.

Blake twitches at the sound of his overly chipper voice, closes her mouth, and nods in agreement.

More silence follows.

She forces her eyes to dart between her parents, and their scrutinizing gazes; all the while the quiet grows stronger in the empty space between their couches, she continues to stare even though she’d rather look anywhere else but them. As she watches them, Kali’s barely-restrained smile starts to hurt her own cheeks, and she realizes that Ghira’s yet to fully recover from his stupor.

Ghira, as if prompted by his daughter’s assessment of him, coughs, pointedly.

“Did you…”

“Um…?”

And then Kali interjects. Blake couldn’t be more grateful, really. She’d had no idea what she was going to say as she and Ghira spoke simultaneously. “Well, I’m sure your drive down here was exhausting!” she says, and she allows her smile to peek through her restraint just enough to elicit a weak imitation from Blake in response. Then she continues. “Why don’t you kids go put your bags upstairs and freshen up. Would you like anything to eat?”

Blake looks to Sun, who looks back at her after not hearing a response from her. He shrugs. “I won’t turn down free food,” he jokes, and her fake smile becomes slightly more real at his voice.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her father rise from the couch, and she takes that as her cue for her and Sun to leave. He follows her lead as she stands; this time, she grabs her luggage before he has a chance to take it from her, and she shoots him a glance as they hurry off to the foyer like bandits with their stolen goods.

“Can you…it?…Oh, don’t give…look. We both…this…to happen…”

She decidedly ignores the way her mother’s weak attempts at whispering float behind her back.

..:|:..

Blake has no sooner thrown her bag— and her _self_ — onto her bed, when a knock comes from her closed bedroom door.

She stifles a groan into her white pillowcase, but rolls from her stomach onto her side nonetheless. “Come in,” she says over her shoulder, and waits for the click of her door opening.

Her childhood bedroom— contrary to her current tastes— is airy, all pale violet walls and white gossamer curtains. The carpeted floor muffles the sound of her guest, where they are hidden from her view behind the small entryway which leads from her door further into the room; but a moment later Sun pokes his head around the corner. He raises an eyebrow at the sight of her, likely appraising the dark stain of her presence spread out in the general lightness of the room, and she stays laying on her side as he joins her, sitting at the foot of her bed.

Her eyes remain on his profile, even while he stares steadfastly at her closet door on the opposite wall. Her gaze trails over his form, and she realizes he’s changed out of his faded green t-shirt and jeans, and now seems more comfortable in navy drawstring shorts and a loose white shirt.

The longer they go without acknowledging each other, the more she feels as though she should say something to him. She’s not sure what she could say, however; they had survived their first round of inspection by her parents. Was that cause for celebration, or for concern? The more she considers the options, the more she isn’t sure. But as she stares at Sun, she thinks that maybe they’re going to pull this off. Kali had been…excited, after all. She frowns as she traces the outline of Sun’s profile with her gaze. Kali had been a bit _too_ excited. A bit too knowing.

And then there was her father. The way he had seemed resigned to the knowledge of Sun’s occupation as her boyfriend.

Her boyfriend. It feels so strange to think, and it felt even stranger to say, less than an hour ago. She frowns as she shifts in her position, angling herself to prop up on her elbow. Her movement jostles Sun, and it causes him to— finally— turn his focus away from analyzing the closet door to look at her.

 _He looks tired,_ she thinks, and she finds that it’s a stark contrast to the way he had been so relaxed in her car just hours earlier, lounging in the passenger seat with his legs pressed against the dashboard, and singly along poorly to the ceaseless winter-themed songs coming through the radio. She doesn’t like the look on him, and she nudges her toe against his thigh. That prompts a smile to his lips, and the weariness fades out of his eyes, the storm gray lightening to a brighter shade.

“That went well, all things considered.” She tells him the first thing to come to mind when she opened her mouth. And truly, it had. The worst case scenario would have been her parents calling them out on this charade from the start. But they seemed to have bought into it.

Sun hummed an agreeable sound at that.

“Aside from your dad trying to shoot lasers out of his eyes at me, but yeah,” he points out. “I’m putting my life on the line for you, here. Did you see his face when he saw me?”

Blake laughs, and Sun’s eyes crinkle at the corners. “I think you were the last person he expected to see,” she says between hushed giggles.

“I know he loves me,” Sun says assuredly, “he’s just got a weird way of showing it. Long stare-downs can secretly be signs of affection, right?”

“If they are, then he must reserve that only for you.”

Sun reaches out and flicks his fingers against her ankle. She nudges her foot at him again, then raises up higher so that she’s sitting level with him, cross-legged on the mattress. He twists to face her, and leans back on his arm braced behind him.

“I was more surprised by Mom,” she continues on. “I’m not going to question it, but she seemed…too happy.”

Sun is shaking his head before she’s finished speaking. “Too happy,” he repeats, “did you want her to be slightly disappointed? Or sad? ‘Oh well, I guess Sun’ll do as a plan B!’”

Blake knows he’s joking. He has to be. He rolls his eyes as he quotes the imaginary Kali’s opinion of him, and he smiles as he says it, but she frowns at the notion all the same. “I don’t think she thought that,” she points out, and Sun shrugs.

“I know, I don’t either. But she was really happy, wasn’t she? Isn’t that the point of this?” he asks.

It is, Blake knows, but there had been a particular insight shrouded in Kali’s smile, one which nags at the back of her mind all the same. She sets the thought aside, regardless; there’s no use worrying about it, when she should simply be thankful that they’d successfully convinced her parents, so far, of their fake relationship’s validity. And she is— thankful, that is. She has Sun to thank, for going along with this. Even if he had seemed like he wanted the ground to swallow him whole, at times.

“It is,” she echoes her thought aloud. And then she continues, when she sees his shoulders loosen ever so slightly. “But…are you okay?”

“Yeah, I am,” Sun says. “Honestly, I thought I was going to die for a second, but other than that, I’m good.” He tilts his head to the side suddenly, as if realizing something he had forgotten. “We’ve just gotta get through more of that for the next three weeks, and then we’re in the clear!”

Hearing the words she’s been reciting to herself coming from Sun’s mouth causes her to laugh again. She rarely feels this free to be so cheerful; the light feeling bubbling out of her feels strange, but with him she doesn’t mind it. He grins at her, and for a moment she can forget that they’re pretending to be something more than what they are. The easiness of being around him hasn’t changed; she feels like they’re back at Beacon, lounging in his living room and watching the terrible romcoms that Sun’s roommates can’t stand but that he takes a secret, guilty pleasure in. Like they aren’t anything other than friends. Being friends is just fine by her, she thinks; there’s no-one else who can draw joy out of her quite like Sun. And they have three weeks to use that to their advantage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I'm not from Florida?
> 
> I apologize for the lateness of this chapter; real life has been very chaotic, no thanks to school taking up a majority of my life and free time. I hope Kali and Ghira shenanigans are enough to make up for the wait, though!


End file.
